The Invention of Murder (55 page)

Even if dogs are left out of the equation, most crimes in the real world were still being detected not by the Hawkshaws of the force, but simply through local knowledge, happenstance or plain good luck. The death of a small girl named Fanny Adams was a case in point. On 24 August 1867, Fanny and three friends were playing in a field near Alton, in Hampshire. A man gave two of the children a penny and told them to run off home, then carried Fanny away. Several hours later her mother passed a man whom one of the children identified as the one who had given her a penny. He shook off Mrs Adams’ questions, telling her that if she wanted him, he would be at his office, where he was clerk to the local attorney, Mr Clements. Shortly afterwards she and her neighbours came upon a horrible sight. Fanny’s head was perched on two hop poles, while on the ground was one of her legs, still with its stocking and boot on. Her right arm, then a hand, then her torso, were found nearby. Her other foot, and left arm, were in the next field. Her intestines had been removed, and were not found until the next day, together with her heart. It was reported that her eyes, which had been removed from her head, were found in the River Wey (this appears an impossibility, but was widely believed). Meanwhile Mr Clements’ clerk, Frederick Baker, told his fellow clerk that ‘as he came along the meadows he met with some women who asked him what he had done with the child. He further said that if anything happened to the child it would be awkward for him.’ Soon the police appeared, acting on information given by Mrs Adams. They found blood on Baker’s cuffs, which he failed to account for. They also found his diary; the day’s entry read: ‘Saturday, 24, killed a young girl; it was fine and hot.’ The general view was that Baker had sexually assaulted the child, and then dismembered her body to hide the fact. If that was his intention he had been successful, as the medical examiner at the inquest said he could not confirm ‘criminal violence’ one way or another.

The trial was swift, although Baker’s defence was good. Alfred Swaine Taylor gave evidence for the prosecution on the bloodstains, stating that they could not be more than three weeks old, although the amount of blood on Baker’s penknife was much less than he expected after a crime of that nature, and was more in line with what would be found after cutting meat, or perhaps from a nosebleed. The evidence for Baker’s absence from work at the crucial time was poor - the other clerk gave conflicting statements, and Baker would have had to have dismembered the child’s body with astonishing swiftness. His lawyer suggested that the diary entry was misleading: with an extra comma – ‘killed, a young girl’ – Baker was merely noting that a child had been killed; as to ‘it was fine and hot’, the
Pall Mall Gazette
later reported that the phrase occurred 164 times in Baker’s diary, and except for this one occasion, always in reference to the weather. Without stretching credulity, therefore, the entry could be understood to read: ‘I have heard a child was killed; the day has been fine and hot.’ The judge summed up remarkably impartially, giving fair emphasis to the defence’s case. Nonetheless, the jury found Baker guilty in only twenty minutes.

Despite the grisliness of the crime – and the even more grisly subsequent use of Fanny Adams’ name as slang for cheap tinned meat - little public interest was aroused by this case. Baker figured in Christmas waxworks exhibitions – Madame Tussaud’s included his model in their ‘Public Amusements’.
Tomahawk,
a satirical magazine, observed that no doubt all ‘mirth-seeking, merry Londoners’ would make a special trip: ‘This is obviously a Christmas treat,’ and it suggested that perhaps books along the same lines could be produced for Christmas presents –
Please, Papa, Take Me to Newgate
was one idea.

The newspapers did their best, producing a series of rumours – that Baker was mad, a drunk, had been sacked for embezzling – but their hearts were not in it. Even the
Illustrated Police News
special was reduced to anodyne phrases like, ‘He bears but an indifferent character in the town’, and the most it could produce by way of deviant behaviour was that Baker had made ‘improper overtures’ to a woman, who evaded him by the simple expedient of running away, leaving him throwing stones after her. The paper made up for the paucity of really good rumour, however, with nearly a dozen illustrations over the course of the inquest and trial. ‘Finding the Remains of Fanny Adams’ shows a stock rustic holding a head, with an arm lying on the ground; ‘Prisoner Mobbed Upon Entering Winchester’ has the police almost overcome by an enraged populace; a particularly vivid portrait of Alfred Swaine Taylor gives him wild hair in a huge bouffant comb-over. Finally came the culminating images: a ‘correct portrait of Calcraft’, the executioner, the ‘last hours of the condemned’ and ‘the wretched man ascending the steps of the scaffold’.

This remarkably placid reception of an extraordinarily brutal murder was echoed by an entire lack of theatrical adaptations. It was not the gore that kept authors away: audiences – the most respectable audiences – had long proved their love of gore. Even for those who found theatre morally dubious, violence was not the problem. The problem was the artifice theatre required. For many, therefore, public readings were the answer, and the most famous readings of the century, possibly of all time, were those of Charles Dickens. In the 1840s he had read sections of his new novels to friends and family, in groups, both formally and informally. He then began to think he might make ‘a great deal of money’ from it, although his friends were against the idea – to turn himself into a performer would, they thought, lower his standing. He did a few charity readings, and in 1857 he returned to the idea. Within seven months he had given a hundred readings, both in London and on a provincial tour, and he continued these until his death, giving between four and eight two-hour performances a week for several weeks a year, to audiences of up to 4,000 people at a time. As he had suspected, he did make a ‘great deal of money’: initially he earned approximately 1,000 guineas a month (the annual salary of the most successful surgeon or barrister in the land); by 1870 he had doubled that.

These early readings were either comic or ‘pathetic’, that is, full of pathos. Then, in 1869, Dickens introduced his most famous reading, ‘Sikes and Nancy’, from
Oliver Twist,
the only reading he performed that revolved around violence, horror – and murder. It is notable that this single crime-reading followed a flurry of crime stories in the press: in 1867,
All the Year Round,
Dickens’ magazine, had reprinted the stories of Eliza Fenning, Corder and Wainewright; in 1868
The Moonstone
swept the country. Henry Irving was having great success with ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. Perhaps even more importantly, ‘Sikes and Nancy’ was introduced the year executions moved behind prison walls, no longer being conducted in public. Dickens’ own murder novel,
Edwin Drood,
would begin serialization the year after ‘Sikes and Nancy’ debuted. As long ago as
Nicholas Nickleby
(1838–39) Dickens had seen the dramatic potential of bloody recitals, when Miss Petowker (‘of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane’) recites ‘The Blood-Drinker’s Burial’, with her ‘bachelor friend. posted in a corner, to rush out at the cue. and catch her in his arms when she died raving mad’.

The ‘Sikes and Nancy’ reading began with Nancy’s betrayal of the gang, and went on to include Fagin’s discovery of her treachery, his incitement to violence of Bill Sikes, and Sikes’ brutal battering to death of his mistress. Dickens held a trial reading of this episode in December 1868, and it left ‘the company. unmistakably pale, and … horror-stricken’. When he performed it publicly, ‘I don’t think a hand moved … or an eye looked away.’ It became the high point of his readings, and its popularity led to the Britannia taking Hazlewood’s 1855 adaptation of
Oliver Twist,
snipping out the Sikes and Nancy scenes and producing them as a separate piece,
The Death of Sikes,
only two months after Dickens’ first public reading of the episode.

Perhaps it was stories like these that made some real-life cases seem tame. The Alton murder was not lacking in disgusting detail, but it was short on mystery or suspense. The suspect calmly identified himself to the victim’s mother, walked back to his office and awaited the police. Fiction required more. In the early 1850s Dickens had Inspector Bucket assume various disguises to track his prey: he dresses as a doctor, ‘a very respectable old gentleman, with grey hair, wearing spectacles … a black spencer [an overcoat] and gaiters and a broad-brimmed hat’. As soon as the supposed medic gains access to the premises where his quarry is hiding, ‘the physician stopped, and taking off his hat, appeared to vanish by magic’. After Inspector Field’s retirement from the police he set up as a private detective, and used the newspaper reports of his similarly ‘cute’ exploits as advertising. The
Bath Chronicle
printed a long article describing in detail how Field had traced a wanted man named Provis by disguising himself as an elderly invalid.
*
By the 1860s, novelists had discovered how very useful disguise was, and what glamour and drama it lent. In an otherwise forgotten novel of 1861, a detective ‘turned … a corner … and drawing from his coat pocket a wig, he in an instant slipped it on. He took off his coat, and, turning the sleeves inside out, put it on again, a totally different coat in shape and make. Putting on a pair of spectacles. the detective, who had turned into that corner a slight and erect man, rather under the middle age. emerged from it a bent and broken down person, rather advanced in years.’

Disguise was fictionally so useful that even the frequent disavowals of professional detectives failed to check disguise-mania. A departmental commission of inquiry into the detective force in the late 1870s heard that although there was a make-up room at Scotland Yard, it was used fewer than six times a year. In 1889 one policeman huffed: ‘It is absurd to suppose that [detective] officers are unknown. Their features, peculiarities of dress, tone of voice … every characteristic’ were routinely recognized by criminals. Yet disguises in fiction continued to become ever more elaborate. By the 1890s, disguises in some boys’ stories were assumed almost for the sake of it. Dan Hays, ‘the well known detective’, goes to see his client wearing a ‘faultless dress suit and tall silk hat’, together with ‘a prodigious set of red whiskers’, and has himself announced as ‘Col. Toddoff, Russian Service’, although he has no reason to hide his identity from his own client, and she recognizes him with no difficulty. And Sherlock Holmes appears at various points as ‘a respectable master mariner who had fallen into years and poverty’, a groom, a clergyman, a priest, ‘an unshaven French
ouvrier’
and an opium addict. In
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
the master of disguise even manages ‘to take a foot off his stature for several hours’ (Watson is amazed each time).

This contradictory phenomenon – disguise and its impossibility – began just as photography was becoming commonplace. The philosopher Walter Benjamin noted the coincidence of the birth of detective fiction with the birth of photography, ‘this most decisive of all conquests of a person’s incognito’. But at the beginning photographs did not reinforce familiarity: it was the differences in each image of the same person that were remarked on. In 1887
The Times
reported that ‘The police authorities at Scotland-yard have in their possession a series of 60 photographs of one and the same German girl. so different are the dress, the look, the expression and the whole appearance of the subject of these photographs. that the most clever detective might readily be imposed upon and fail to recognize the identity of the “artiste”.’ This new technological marvel did not at first allay fears, but exacerbated them, by displaying the extreme cunning of the criminal.

Photographs of the notorious Mary Ann Cotton existed in 1872, but they were no longer sold as souvenirs, as engravings of criminals had been ever since Thurtell. Mrs Cotton’s case, for all its horror, was reported in a subdued, almost discreet fashion. Mrs Cotton was originally from County Durham, and was said to have worked as a nursemaid and as a Wesleyan Sunday-school teacher before she married William Mowbray, a colliery worker, in 1852. They moved about the country as Mowbray found work, and together they had nine children. By the mid-1860s, five children had died, and the couple and their surviving children were living in Sunderland. Mowbray was ill, finding it harder to get work, and soon died; two more children followed him. His widow and the two surviving children moved to Seaham Harbour, south of Sunderland, and there she was employed as a nurse at the Sunderland Infirmary. In 1865 she married George Ward, an engineer whom she had nursed, but he died within the year. She became housekeeper to James Robinson, a shipyard foreman with five children, and within six months they were married. One of Robinson’s children died the week she took up her post, as did one of her two children by Mowbray. The other was living with the new Mrs Robinson’s mother; in the spring of 1867 she went to nurse her mother, who died unexpectedly nine days later. Mrs Robinson returned with her child; two of Robinson’s children died in April, and her own child in May, all of gastric fever. By now the couple had had two children, one of whom had died.

In October 1869 Robinson discovered that his wife had been trying to borrow money using his name, and his son told him she had been secretly sending him to pawn goods Robinson had given her. He accused her, and she left, taking with her her surviving child and the contents of her Post Office savings account. She soon abandoned the child, who was later returned to Robinson. By 1870 she was pregnant again, by Frederick Cotton, a colliery labourer and her fourth (and this time bigamous) husband. The Cottons moved to West Auckland in County Durham in 1871, with their baby and two boys from Cotton’s previous marriage. Joseph Nattrass, who had been the new Mrs Cotton’s lover before she met Robinson, reappeared as their lodger, and in September 1871 Cotton died suddenly. Mrs Cotton began to work for Mr Quick-Manning, an excise officer at a brewery, and in swift succession Cotton’s eldest son, her baby, Nattrass and Cotton’s sister Margaret all died.